Physics Of The Riderless Bike
via cyclelicious
quote out of context
Pelham, Mirenberg and Jones (2002) found that the names Jerry, Dennis and Walter were the 39th, 40th, and 41st most frequent male names in the 1990 census (moreover the absolute frequency of (Jerry+Walter)/2 was almost identical to that of Dennis). But in a nationwide search they found 482 dentists named Dennis but just 257 named Walter, and 270 named Jerry, a highly statistical significant difference. Hence the meme was born, “Dennis is more like to be a Dentist.”
Daryl at breakfast
You’ll be happy to know that I was just trying to calculate how old a person would be when he’d made a mile of poop.
mathematical legislation?
Congresswoman Martha Roby (R-Ala.) wants to legally change the value of π:
Roby, raised in Montgomery, Ala., is on the House Committee on Education and the Workforce, and the Subcommittee on Early Childhood, Elementary and Secondary Education.
“It’s no panacea, but this legislation will point us in the right direction. Looking at hard data, we know our children are struggling with a heck of a lot of the math, including the geometry incorporating pi,” Roby said. “I guarantee you American scores will go up once pi is 3. It will be so much easier.”
Democrats first responded to the measure with a mixture of incredulity and amusement.
I’m confused.
UPDATE: The internet tells me this is a sham. Thank god.
zen koan
The Q-Tips are out, so I clean my ears.
Speaking of weird
The Iowan remembers numbers. Someone will say, “What was my address and my number on the Upper West Side in 1985?” He remembers. “Okay, what about Jill’s parents’ number when we were living in London in 1977?” Same result. The funny thing is the Iowan is not very good at math. I do better calculating the everyday stuff in my head.
But it gets weirder. As a grade schooler, Mr. Boudreaux had a password for something I was helping him with, an online computer game maybe, I can’t remember exactly. I asked him for the password. He reeled off a long list of numbers. “Are you reading those from somewhere?” I asked him. No. Okay, make up another one. He dictated something, which I wrote down, then had him repeat the sequence. He did it easily. “Are you seeing those numbers in your mind?” I asked. He said no, it was just something he could do. This aren’t special numbers, birthdays, etc. His laptop, for instance, has a password that is a long list of random numbers.
I can barely remember my own telephone number and address. I’m not sure I have a specialty. How about you?
Salman Khan’s TED talk
I don’t usually post TED talks here, because if I did, then I’d be tempted to post all of them.
This is an exception, because it absolutely needs to be heard:
EDIT: The Khan Academy website can be found here. Just read through the course listing if you want to be stunned.
Hawaiian Hazelnut Aloha Noisette
Speaking of turtles.
from the comments
Yes, donkeys have held our affection the longest. Because of donkey fuckers. But, you know, we mustn’t be forever tied to tradition. We need to make way for the new. I’m not sure that any of us even thought about honey badgers when we designated donkeys and goats as official clusterflock animals.
I’m gonna tell you up front, I don’t have the right tools to fix this one. And even if I had the right tools, I can’t promise you that I could fix a problem like this.
Nova, Hunting the Hidden Dimension
An overview of Benoit Mandelbrot and the mathematics of fractals.
from the spam
If a train departing Philadelphia, moving at seventy-five mph and moving to the north hits a mime, is there adequate information to correctly answer the question: is there a minimum velocity required to kill a mime?
headline of the day
Teen Mathletes Do Battle at Algorithm Olympics
Richard Feynman playing bongos
Amanda said
My favorite math is Leviticus.
numerology
My juror number: 1679
The last four digits of my Google Voice number: 1679
from the moderated comments
If you are not down with the clown or crown for that matter… Yall can lick my aqueduct, you red-neck fucks.
WHOOP WHOOP
MMFWCL
“Only old ladies answer the phone”
Political polls may become increasingly suspect and unhelpful in the future:
The immediate problem is the rapid growth in the number of people who have only a mobile phone, and are thus excluded from surveys conducted by landline. About a quarter of Americans are now “cellphone-onlys” (CPOs) in the industry jargon, and this poses both practical and statistical difficulties. They are less likely to answer their phones, and less likely to participate in a survey when they do, says Frank Newport of Gallup, another polling firm. They often retain their telephone numbers, including the area code, when they move from state to state, so it is hard to know where they are. And it costs more to call a mobile phone in the first place.
I can’t ever think of a time I participated in a poll.
word of the day
from the moderated comments
the human consciousness is a dimension… unto itself… ok think of a one dimensional dot, now a line or drawing of a human, now the shape of a human, now i human moving in space and time, and now a consciousness poking into our world through the intersecting points on the dimensional planes… through us. weird thought, I am sure someone has thought of it before.
Pick a Number–Any Number
Republican U.S. Rep. Michele Bachmann told supporters shortly after the rally that “we’re not going to let anyone get away with saying there were less than a million here today — because we were witnesses.”
CBS commissioned an estimate from AirPhotosLive, a company that provides crowd sizes based on aerial photos. CBS noted that there’s a margin of error of plus or minus 9,000. So, by this estimate, there were as few as 78,000 attendees or as many as 96,000.
I’m sure miracles occured there, too. They just haven’t put the finishing touches on the documentation yet.
The Booty Pop Infomercial
Mathematicians are facing a stark choice — embrace monstrous infinite entities or admit the basic rules of arithmetic are broken
Well, here’s an even more subversive thought: are the rules of arithmetic, the basic logical premises underlying things like long division, unsound? Implausible, you might think. After all, human error aside, our number system delivers pretty reliable results. Yet the closer mathematicians peer beneath the hood of arithmetic, the more they are becoming convinced that something about numbers doesn’t quite add up. The motor might be still running, but some essential parts seem to be missing — and we’re not sure where to find the spares.
(via kottke)
Quote out of context, but really, you don’t need it.
Asked by Colorado public radio to describe his world view, McInnis cited “Seabiscuit” and the concept of working-class Americans succeeding. Pressed on whether he was referring to the movie or the book, he answered that he’s “not an academic.”
-Ronya
Cindy Traveling
…for a visit in El Paso. Haven’t heard from her yet but I’m getting telepathic messages. They are general, though. Like categories.
What Gravity?
What is new, he said, is the idea that differences in entropy can be the driving mechanism behind gravity, that gravity is, as he puts it an “entropic force.”
That inspiration came to him courtesy of a thief.
